The Cherry Blossom Corpse

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  Contents

  Chapter 1: Fateful Meeting

  Chapter 2: Dark Stranger

  Chapter 3: The Rival Queens

  Chapter 4: Whirlwind Tour

  Chapter 5: Dark Consequences

  Chapter 6: The Men in Blue

  Chapter 7: The Secrets of the Bedroom

  Chapter 8: Deadly Deception

  Chapter 9: The Puppet-Master

  Chapter 10: Attendants on the Queen

  Chapter 11: Come into my Parlour

  Chapter 12: Cold Facts

  Chapter 13: Ladies’ Man

  Chapter 14: Best Friends

  Chapter 15: The Wilder Shores

  Chapter 16: Ganging Up

  Chapter 17: False Witnesses

  Chapter 18: Untangled Skein

  Chapter 19: Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Fateful Meeting

  “OH LOOK, DARLINGS, CHERRY BLOSSOM,” said Amanda Fairchild, as we sped from the docks into the centre of Bergen, and towards the bus station. She added, with a cat-like smile: “Especially for me.”

  I didn’t tell her it was apple, and I didn’t ask why it should be thought to be especially for her. I’d already had Amanda Fairchild up to here. My sister Cristobel, however, could always be relied upon to make the expected response.

  “Why especially for you?”

  “Really, darling! Do you mean to say you haven’t read Hearts in Cherry Blossom Time? It was my Autumn title last year. It sold better than ever. If you haven’t read it, darling, I assure you there’s seventy-five thousand who have!”

  “Seventy-five thousand! Golly!” said Cristobel.

  Amanda Fairchild purred in the front seat of the taxi. I sat in the back of the taxi, with Cristobel and Jan, my wife, my son Daniel on my knee. I was glowering, and gazing bleakly ahead at the prospect of the next four days.

  Amanda Fairchild had latched on to us on the boat from Newcastle to Bergen the night before. The canteen area had been very crowded, and the spare place at our table had been taken by a very drunk Norwegian, who kept pawing Jan, telling long and incomprehensible stories, and shouting “Cuckoo!” at the top of his voice. While he was at the bar getting further supplies, Amanda Fairchild commandeered his place, and repelled him vigorously on his return. At the time it had seemed as though anything would be better than a Norwegian drunk, and perhaps the warmth of my welcome to her was over-warm, to the point of being positively misleading. I don’t normally pile on the warmth for over-made-up ladies of a certain age in billowing pink shantung coats, certainly not those who pat me intimately on the arm, make coy remarks about my largeness, and indulge in feebleminded generalizations about “the male of the species” for my benefit. Nor was the progressive sinking of the heart arrested when it was revealed that Amanda Fairchild’s mission in Bergen was the same as ours.

  My sister Cristobel had recently fallen victim to The Curse of the Trethowans and become literary. She had converted her meagre romantic experience and her unbounded romantic longings into three novelettes that had been published by Bills and Coo, specialists in the hearts and flowers market. I suppose with a name like Cristobel there was never much chance that she would write anything other than romantic pulp. Obviously, when Cristobel told me that the World Association of Romantic Novelists (WARN for short, and I should have been) was holding its bi-annual jamboree in Bergen I should have laughed sardonically. When she said that she would love to go, but didn’t have the courage to go on her own, I should have said “Tough!” and changed the subject. When she asked me directly to go with her and accompany her to the early sessions, I should gravely have assured her that I was prevented from doing so by my duties at Scotland Yard. That I did not do so may be put down to obscure feelings of guilt that I have on the subject of my sister Cristobel.

  So here we all were. Cristobel, after long and tedious heart-searchings, had left her child in the care of the local vicar’s wife. Jan and Daniel, my wife and son, had joined the party, Jan specifying that after one night in Bergen they would take to the mountains. I contracted with Cristobel for no less than three days of the conference before I went up to Oppheim to join them. My expectations were from the beginning of the lowest, and they assumed palpable shape in the fleshy, pink form of Amanda Fairchild.

  We were hardly out of the blossom trees before the taxi drew up at the bus station. I paid the driver a sum which in England would have taken you three times round the Isle of Wight. Amanda Fairchild watched me doing it, but made no effort to contribute. Perhaps she had old-fashioned notions about not offending the pride of the male, but personally I felt that if she had 75,000 readers hanging on her every scented word, she could well be expected to chip in with the odd krone. The bus station, when I turned around, proved to be decidedly unattractive—not so much post-war brutalist as post-war don’t care. We walked through an open foyer, and down into a dank and depressing subterranean passage.

  “What a dismal place!” said Amanda Fairchild. “Creepy without being Gothic! I imagine it as the resort of drunks and druggies, and people like that.”

  My policeman’s instinct had told me pretty much the same thing. I mentally reminded myself that the fact that a woman has a silly manner and a silly profession does not necessarily mean that she is a silly woman. We followed the directions on our conference advice sheet and went up some steps to Platform No. 7, out again into the May sunshine.

  The bus that was to take us to Kvalevåg and our guest-house was not in, but another little knot of conference attenders was. Inevitably, with the British abroad, they were discussing the cost of the taxi fare.

  “Darlings, was it frightfully steep?” said Amanda, swooping pinkly upon them like an Australian galah. “I had my preux chevalier who paid. Darlings, this is a terribly sweet man called Perry Trethowan—such a romantic name—from Scotland Yard, whom I positively picked up on the boat last night. Perry . . . er, Jan, isn’t it? . . . these are all dear, dear friends of mine—” She waved her hands vaguely at the little knot, leaving me uncertain whether she actually knew any of their names, before finally she swooped unerringly on the plainest woman among them and brought her over to us.

  “This is positively one of the most talented writers we have—Amarynth Dartle.”

  “Mary Sweeny,” said the woman, putting out her hand. “I suppose if you’re from Scotland Yard you’ll be used to aliases.”

  “Not ones like Amarynth Dartle,” I murmured.

  “Not my idea, at all,” she protested. “Dickens out of Cartland.”

  “Darling, your latest is without question your best,” gushed Amanda. “I was riveted. I brought it as my boat reading, knowing I would be riveted, and I was. My cabin light was hardly off all night.”

  “You must be a remarkably slow reader, Amanda. It’s only 120 pages. My publisher tells me it’s gone reasonably well, but of course it’s trash like all the rest.”

  “Mary, darling, why do you always disparage our calling?”

  “It’s not a calling, it’s a trade. We’re trash vendors.”

  “Nonsense. We are merchants of dreams.”

  I looked with definite interest at Miss, or Mrs., or Ms. Sweeny, thinking she might in the days ahead provide the necessary whiff of sulphuric acid in the prevailing diet of saccharine. She was a sandy-haired woman, indeterminate of feature, dressed in the cheap, sensible clothes
of a woman in her forties abroad. Only a sharp, hard glint in the eye proclaimed her intelligence. She and I exchanged glances, as of one hard-boiled cynic to another.

  At this moment the bus came in, and though Amanda Fairchild showed an alarming inclination to commandeer me, she was deflected by another man of the party who asked her a question about sales and contracts. The words sparked an immediate response, and Amanda launched into an authoritative disquisition which carried her on to the bus, and into a seat next to the small, thin, sandy man who had asked it. I was safe. Cristobel showed her familiar signs of panic at the thought of being left to sit with Mary Sweeny (Cristobel clings, you will notice), so Jan and Daniel sat with her, and I sat over the way with the trash vendor.

  From further down the bus floated Amanda Fairchild’s voice, articulating the magic figure “seventy-five thousand.”

  “The annoying thing is,” said Mary Sweeny, “that figure is probably nothing but the truth. Ten years ago if Amanda said ‘forty thousand,’ you could be pretty sure it was no more than thirty. Now she doesn’t need to lie.”

  “Awesome to think of,” I said. “Seventy-five thousand putting down good money for that candy-floss.”

  “Quite,” said Mary Sweeny. “And you can afford to feel superior. I can’t. The galling thing for me is that if that many put their money down for my candy-floss fantasies, it wouldn’t be money any better spent. Amanda is supremely professional. The product is excellent. She’s very good at her job.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “One wishes she could distinguish the product from Jane Eyre. Or even from Precious Bane. Though perhaps we’re being unfair. Very possibly she can. Amanda has so many false fronts that she’s like a magician’s cabinet. I doubt whether anybody has penetrated to the real Amanda since she was thirteen. But one thing she is not, is stupid.”

  “That, eventually, was my impression,” I agreed.

  “And why,” asked Mary Sweeny suddenly, “are you here under false pretences?”

  “False pretences?” I said, astonished. “Nothing of the kind. I’ve never claimed to have written any of your kind of junk. I’m just here to accompany my sister.”

  “So I gathered from the introductions,” she said, rummaging in her handbag. She pulled out at length a list of the delegates.

  “I don’t think I’ve got that,” I said.

  “Your sister’s probably got it. She may have been keeping it from you.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “See here: Mrs. Cristobel Trethowan and Superintendent Trethowan. The implication is plain.”

  “Oh God!” I said. “Cristobel’s made a boob.”

  “Not at all. Only husbands and wives were supposed to attend the sessions.”

  “Oh well—if you don’t object, it can remain a sort of official secret. After all, it may be some kind of protection.”

  “Protection? Do you imagine you’ll need that? What kind of image do you have of us? I assure you, Amanda is not typical. Romantic novelists are very seldom romantic.”

  “They’re very seldom novelists either.”

  We exchanged quick grins.

  “Amanda is on the whole the exception, and even there—you notice the enthusiasm with which she responded to the words ‘sales’ and ‘contracts’? What romantic novelists are interested in is money. You’re more likely to be robbed than raped.”

  “Well, I think I should be able to protect myself against theft,” I said.

  The bus chugged along through scenery so glorious that it seemed laid out by some art-director’s hand for the purpose of a Hollywood musical, in greens so rich as to be super-natural. We had no worries about where to get off, for we were to be met. We had been offered a great range of accommodations, from the international hotels run by airlines, down to camping sites—for those, presumably, whose wares had not yet found favour with the great sighing public. We had chosen one in the middle price range, some way out of Bergen. I didn’t know what sort of night life romantic novelists went in for during their international beanos, but I didn’t fancy being part of it. The countryside, too, seemed to offer the possibility of getting away from it all—or, to be specific, them all—and I had ideas, if I were let off the leash by Cristobel, of taking advantage of it.

  “I can’t think what Amanda Fairchild is doing, coming to a mere guest-house,” I said. “I’d have thought she would have preferred to jet-set it in one of the international hotels.”

  “More romantic?” suggested Mary Sweeny. “And Amanda always did like being a big fish in a small pond. Though, to be fair, Amanda these days is a big fish wherever she swims. Of the English writers she’s second only to Barbara Cartland—and Barbara’s not coming this year.”

  “Busy tending her bees, I suppose.”

  “Probably. And Barbara isn’t getting any younger, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Amanda will be Queen of the British bees at this conference. As far as sheer awfulness is concerned, though, she will face very stiff competition from one or two of the Americans.”

  “Oh God,” I breathed. “What have I let myself in for?”

  And I went rather quiet for the rest of the journey.

  We arrived at Kvalevåg after about forty minutes, and were indeed met at the roadside by a spare lady with a ramrod back, dressed in rather drab greys and fawns, and wearing shoes so sensible as to verge on the downright. She shook each of us by the hand, unsmiling, and to all of us murmured the formula “Good afternoon. Welcome to Kvalevåg.” Then she directed a young man to pile our luggage on to a trolley, and led the way down the little dirt road towards the guest-house. We followed obediently, rather like a scout troop, and if we let out “oohs” and “aahs” at the scenery, it was, I assure you, scenery so indescribable in its loveliness that they were perfectly appropriate responses. Finally we passed a little notice saying Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri, and we saw the house.

  It was a square, solid, white wooden house, of no great pretensions, but of immense charm. It had been built, I learned later, by one of the many Norwegian First World War profiteers, as a summer house for his family. Less gracious than an American colonial mansion, it looked domestic, comfortable, welcoming. In the centre of its façade was a large porch with chairs, above which was a little wooden balcony around the doors of one of the bedrooms, and above this in turn was a pair of gabled windows. But what gave the house its real charm was its setting—the circular path to the front door, the stunning quiet, broken only by the birds, the trees in which one imagined squirrels watching us, the blossom, the spring flowers.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” said the insignificant man.

  “Haven’t we been clever?” said Mary Sweeny.

  The proprietress’s face broke into a rare smile. She paused to let us admire, then led the way slowly round the drive towards the house. We exclaimed, we examined shrubs and flowers. Daniel ran ecstatically here and there, looking for animals, and finding them. Even I had to admit that, if romantic novelists had to meet anywhere, this was undoubtedly the place. Finally we all collected on the porch, gazed at each other, smiling at our luck, and then one by one tore ourselves from the prospect and went into the shade of the house.

  Last to tear herself away from the view was Amanda. She had been unusually silent during the walk, and I had the impression that she was plotting. Now she stood there, pink, powdered, and rapt, it seemed, with the romantic loveliness of it all.

  “Darlings!” she called. “We are going to have such peace here!”

  Little, as one of her Victorian precursors might have said, did she know.

  Chapter 2

  Dark Stranger

  THE SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE FIRST NIGHT were decidedly cramped. Cristobel and I both had single rooms, and a camp bed had been put up in mine for Jan’s one night, and another in Cristobel’s for Daniel’s. However, the splendour of the surroundings made us forget any discomforts, and since we found in our room a folder with details of the confere
nce and the participants, there was a certain grisly pleasure in going through that. Mostly this consisted of Jan laughing herself silly at the thought of what I was going to have to endure.

  “Oh, look: on Wednesday there’s a symposium on ‘New Trends in the Romantic Hero’—Amanda Fairchild one of the panel. Do you think you might put in a contribution from the floor? And on Tuesday there’s a lecture entitled ‘Whither the Gothic?’ What can that mean? Ah—here’s one on ‘New Markets in Eastern Europe.’ You don’t think they’re allowed to read Amanda Fairchild in Albania, do you?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. I believe all pop music is banned there—it’s the only good thing I’ve ever heard about the place—so I can’t see anything so unsocially-realistic as Amanda getting through the censorship. What about the excursions?”

  “Grieg’s home, with a short concert of piano music. Pity you’ve always hated Grieg. Bus tour of Hardanger to see the trees in bloom.”

  “Oh God. Amanda will announce that they’ve come out specially for her. I’ll have to make sure I’m on a different bus.”

  “Ah—here’s a list of participants.”

  “I’ve already seen that. Cristobel has managed to imply that I’m her husband.”

  “Really? Is that to fend off passionate suitors? I did rather wonder whether Cristobel hoped—”

  “I gather only husbands and wives are allowed to go along to the sessions. So you may still be right. Do you think she’s ripe for romance again?”

  “I suspect she wants a father for her fatherless child. She’s been reading all this stuff about the danger of a child growing up without a male influence.”

  “That’s nothing to the danger of a child growing up under the influence of the sort of male Cristobel is likely to saddle herself with. Better a one-parent family any day.”

  “Oh look: they tell you where everyone is staying. It’s rather like the peerage—an order of precedence. Who’s here, I wonder? Arthur Biggs—Lorinda Mason in brackets. I expect that’s the sandy little man Amanda was discussing contracts with. He looks like an Arthur Biggs, though not much like a Lorinda Mason. Patti Drewe, no brackets, so presumably she writes under her own name. And Amanda Fairchild admits to no other either. But here’s someone called Lorelei Zuckerman, who writes under the name of Lorelei le Neve. Now I’ve heard that name.”